Techniques for providing canned video files to clients using reliable communication protocols such as Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), Internet Protocol (IP), etc., exist. Techniques for real time video delivery to clients also exist. However, existing techniques for real time video delivery suffer from reliability and scalability issues. FIG. 1 is a diagram illustrating a typical network environment 100 for real time video delivery. Video data generated by camera 102 is converted into a Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) format by RTSP server 104 and delivered as an RTSP stream over a network 106 to one or more clients 108. Due in part to the stateful nature of RTSP, existing techniques for scaling an RTSP stream for delivery to a large number of clients are inefficient and in some cases unreliable. Server 104 can support providing the RTSP stream to only a relatively small number of clients 108, with the quality of the delivered RTSP stream often degrading as the number of clients being served increases. Moreover, existing techniques for distributing an RTSP stream to multiple nodes of a content delivery network (CDN) are unduly complex and inefficient. As such, improvements to real time video delivery are needed.